ECHO

Echo Wiki…if you’ve been following RSS, you’re aware that there are two main versions of RSS. In theory, the concept of RSS is too dry to really evoke great passions…but reality brings a different perspective. Discussion lists devoted to syndication can get quite heated. Just to add more spice to the fragmented world of content syndication, a new group has formed to promote Echo (see their motivation). Their goal “develop a common syntax for syndication, archiving and an publishing API.”
It’s apparently a clean slate…but the history of bad blood between players in the content syndication circus don’t offer much hope. I’m afraid that as they move forward, previous battles will surface…rendering the entire concept impotent…and then allowing Microsoft or IBM to create and drive their own standards.
Final thought: RSS works because it’s simple. It’s like email – it doesn’t take long to figure out how it works…it’s not perfect, but it meets the needs of a large number of people. Sure, email can be made more complex, more advanced…but then who would use the new tool? Basically, technologists…the other 95% of the world would stick with regular email…for more thoughts on this, see Scoble

This was written by gsiemens. Posted on Sunday, June 29, 2003, at 11:54 pm. Filed under Uncategorized. Tagged XML. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.